According to the World Health Organization, 30,000 women and 400,000 babies die every year from infections worldwide. This is often caused by a lack of water, sanitation, and poor hand-washing practices. “Keeping hands clean can prevent 1 in 3 diarrheal illnesses and 1 in 5 respiratory infections, such as a cold or the flu”, states the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The most effective way to stop such infections and stay healthy is also the simplest — handwashing with soap and water. Despite this and even after various campaigns to spread awareness on the importance of proper hand hygiene, compliance remains low. Report on National Statistical Survey 76th round substantiates this. According to it, while members of most households wash their hands before a meal, only 38.5% do so with soap.

This difficulty of sustained change is because, to make a behavior repeated as often as needed, it must become a habit. Reshmaan Hussam et al. in their 2016 study in rural West Bengal found that 57% of households do not wash their hands with soap. The reason they state is — “obhyash nai” (“I do not have the habit”). There is a need to inculcate handwashing as a habit at a young age among children so that proper hand-hygiene practice can become a lifelong habit. To this end, our research team at AMMACHI Labs is working on developing a social robot, which aims to instill proper hand hygiene habits among young children.

In 2019, we did a study with children from a rural school in India with our previous embodiment of the handwashing robot called Pepe. In this study, we found that the presence of the robot near the handwashing station increased both the quality of handwashing as well as the total number of hands washed. These promising results motivated us to improve upon Pepe. During the study, Pepe was teleoperated by the researchers. To automate this process leveraging AI and to include children in the design process, we are currently developing an advanced version of the handwashing robot, named Haksh-E. The name 'Haksh-E’ is inspired by a combination of two Sanskrit words. 'Hastha' (meaning 'hand') and 'Kshalanam' (meaning 'cleaning').

Social robots as agents of positive behavior change is an active research field. With our robot Haksh-E, we intend to promote good hand-hygiene behavior in children through repeated reminders. Such a robot has the potential to revolutionize handwashing interventions. Moreover, our efforts towards handwashing habit formation focus on motivation and positive emotions rather than on models that focus on the fear of infections and epidemics.

Additionally, the robot can supply valuable objective data to stakeholders like the school authorities, health departments, the local government, and the United Nations (UN) to track progress on UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) targets for SDG 3 and SDG 6.

OVERVIEW:

Design and Physical Appearance

Haksh-E is an embodied social robot. Social robots are robots that interact with users through natural communications and engage in meaningful and beneficial interactions. In other words, they achieve their goals through social interactions. For the social acceptance of the robot, a physical embodiment plays an important role. Studies have found that, unlike a non-embodied agent, an embodied agent that interacts with humans in real-time, communicating naturally is more engaging during long-term interactions. In addition, a physical embodiment also enables us to use non-verbal communication channels, for example, gestures. Designing the robot’s appearance to match its intended application is also necessary. For these reasons, we modeled Haksh-E as an anthropomorphized soap dispenser.

It has a human-like animated face rendered on an LCD screen. The animated mouth lip-syncs to the robot’s speech. Based on our co-design study with children we are also developing multiple physical embodiment designs, to understand how children want a handwashing social robot to look and sound like.

Action Recognition

For monitoring the quality of hand washing and suggesting corrections or improvements to the children about the six different handwashing steps as suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO), Haksh-E has an integrated vision system that captures the handwashing action performed by children. This visual data is used by an advanced deep learning model for human action detection. The model measures the quality of hand washing performed and identifies missed steps. This information is used by the robot to provide real-time feedback to the children during handwashing.

Conversational Agent

Conversational AI enables a machine to understand, process, and respond to human language. To enable non-linear and user-friendly interactions between the handwashing robot and children, it was necessary to incorporate a Conversational AI model (voice bot) into the robot. To achieve this, HakshE uses the RASA Open-Source platform and Google's ASR and TTS engines, to create a virtual AI voice assistant which will be capable of understanding what people say and respond to it accordingly.

The conversational agent, embedded into Haksh-E, can have conversations on the topic of hand hygiene and handwashing, as well as limited non-linear conversations such as telling jokes, reciting rhymes, talking about the weather, and well-being of the person the robot is interacting with. It can also describe the various steps of handwashing as prescribed by WHO.

Emotion-Driven Decision Making

For long-term engagement with children, we need an effective child-robot interaction system that utilizes verbal and non-verbal communication modalities of the robot. Towards this, we are currently developing an emotion-driven decision-making system with which the robot can make meaningful, coordinated decisions for creating a better 'understanding' of the emotional state of the child. The algorithm will decide the suitable combination of verbal and non-verbal responses to synchronize with the child’s emotional input and choose the appropriate tone of voice, facial expression, and neck motion in response to it.

Recognition

• Haksh-E’s design got selected for an E-Poster and spotlight presentation in the IROS 2021 Workshop on Robotics and the UN SDGs
• Article featuring Haksh-E in the New Indian Express dated 08th November 2021.

1. [http://www.sustainablerobotics.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/HAKSH-E-An-Autonomous-Social-Robot-for-Promoting-Good-Hand-Hygiene-among-Children1.pdf] 2. [https://ammachilabs.org/projects/pepe-the-social-robot-pilot-project-in-schools/] 3.[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8956450]